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No more running around trying to get systems back up, says Peterborough City Council's Richard Godfrey

Richard Godfrey, assistant director of Digital Peterborough and one of the IT team leading a shift of Peterborough City Council systems to the cloud, has claimed that the Salesforce.com outage at the end of March "was pretty much the best disaster recovery process I've ever been through".

Godfrey suggested during the panel debate at the V3 Cloud & Infrastructure Live 2016 Summit (today's panel debate will broadcast at 11.15) that, while cloud meant that business continuity plans need to be revisited, it ought to make disaster recovery a much less fraught affair.

"Salesforce.com went down three weeks ago for about half the day and it was pretty much the best disaster recovery process I've ever been through because if systems go down on-premise I have an IT team that is running around trying to find faults, trying to find problems. What's going on? What do we need to do? How do we restore service?" said Godfrey.

"We lost the network last August and it probably took us four or five days to bring everything back up. Salesforce went down and it's almost just a shrug of the shoulders. It will come back up because they have bigger people than Peterborough City Council shouting at them.

"It changes our model from having a big disaster recovery plan to a business continuity plan. What do our teams do if they don't have an application available? How do they work? What do we work off instead? It gives us a very different model.

"So, my disaster recovery [with Salesforce] was effectively five text messages between me and Salesforce with updates and I woke up the next morning to a text that said: 'We have been stable since four o'clock this morning. You're good to go.' Which is why I say it was the most relaxed disaster recovery process I've ever had at the council."

He concluded: "We know that if Google goes down, it will come back. We know that if Box goes down, it will come back. We can't control when, but I also know that Salesforce will have an army of people working to bring that system back, and they will have been working through the night to do that until they got it stable."